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T O P I C R E V I E W

Ken Havekotte

The "CHIX in Space" patch was a souvenir issue provided by Kentucky Fried Chicken for a student experiment aboard space shuttle Challenger on Mission 51L. It was going to be an experiment to study the effects of weightlessness on 32 chicken embryos.

About an hour(+) after the Challenger launch tragedy, one of the Joint Industry Press Center (JIPC) reps at the time (the site's manager), wanted me to keep a bunch of the Kentucky Fried Chicken "CHIX IN SPACE" cloth patches since the KFC public relations rep was leaving the facility and not planning to return because of the tragedy.

He left behind a small box of the patches, mostly there as give-a-ways to badged news media folks covering STS-51L in Jan. 1986.

The site's manager kept them with her until closure of the joint press center after the tragedy. During my last visit there on launch day, around 1 p.m. or so, Carol wanted me to have/keep the remainder of the boxed patches, which I did.

FullThrottle

Thanks for posting this! Do you know anything else about the Kentucky Fried experiment? I've seen mention of this patch and the experiment in the past but no details into either.

STS-51L was on my 5th birthday, I have always been interested in the orbiter Challenger's missions, trivia and nick-nacks...

Any further information that collectSPACE members have on fried chicken in space would be great to read!

george9785

I have a press kit relating to the experiment. Included with the kit is a patch and photo. Here's the photo:

Briefly, as Ken advised, the experiment was to study the effects of weightlessness on embryo development.

Ken Havekotte

There is an official KFC press kit folder that I have along with other "Chix In Space" technical, experiment, and crew interaction releases, photos, and reports.

If anything specific is needed, let us know, as I see that Canada's "george9785" is planning to post the official press kit soon.

Just off the bat, though, a sophomore mechanical engineering major at Purdue University, John Vellinger, had designed and built a special incubator to cradle the 32 fertile chicken eggs that were aboard Challenger.

He was the experiment's designer, of Lafayette, IN, and won the 1983 NASA National Science Competition with his "Chix In Space" embryo development study under zero-gravity conditions.

The "Chix In Space" project was funded by a grant from Kentucky Fried Chicken Corp. with their headquarters in Louisville, KY.

I wonder what Vellinger is doing and working on these days? He would be in his late 40s now.

Robert Pearlman

quote:Originally posted by Ken Havekotte:I wonder what Vellinger is doing and working on these days? He would be in his late 40s now.

Today, Vellinger is the President and CEO of Techshot Lighting, a manufacturer of rugged and energy efficient LED lighting products for military customers and disaster relief agencies.

I work for John here at Techshot. He's a great guy, and still has a passion for building space research hardware.

He formed our company with the Kentucky Fried Chicken engineer with whom he built the Chix-in-Space payload. The flight unit is in the Kansas Cosmosphere, we have the back up unit. We'd love to know how the flight unit ended up there.

Our latest payload will be the first X-ray machine launched to the ISS. It will image mice in space to study bone loss.